Angel Interrupted (5 page)

The mother was sure the killer had taken her son. No one could tell her otherwise.

She was a heavyset woman with curly red hair and freckles sprinkled up and down her arms and legs. Her face was splotchy, and she could not stop shaking as she sobbed out her fears. She carried an immense sorrow with her, as if her whole world had been lost. But it was not a new emotion; I could sense she had grown as used to it as a beetle to its shell. Her fear was fueled by past tragedy as much as by the present circumstances.

A small crowd had surrounded the sobbing woman, wanting to lend support. Other playground mothers, grim-faced, tried to calm her as their children, ashen-faced, tried to understand what was happening.

Calvano pushed away those trying to comfort her and sat beside the mother, assuring her that he was a detective and that they would find her son.

It was as if the woman were deaf. She continued to sob uncontrollably, unable to assist at all.

After a few minutes of cajoling, Calvano started to lose patience. I could not say I blamed him. They were losing precious moments better spent looking for the boy. Others realized this as well. Spurred into action by Calvano’s increasingly impatient voice, a woman who was holding on firmly to the hand of her daughter tapped Calvano on the shoulder and beckoned him to follow her. They stood away from the bench where they would not be overheard by the sobbing mother.

“She lost her husband in Iraq a year ago,” the woman told Calvano. “She was hospitalized for a month when she found out. I don’t think she’ll be of much help at all. If you don’t find Tyler, she’ll have nothing left and she knows it. I think you better call her doctor.”

Now it was Calvano’s turn to panic. The mother’s help was essential. If the cases were related, they needed to know. If not, if someone had just taken advantage of the distraction and snatched the boy, it could be the worst kind of case. Without the mother’s help, they had nothing.

It was about to get even worse. Calvano left the sobbing woman with her friends and went to consult with Maggie just as dozens of well-meaning neighbors and strangers alike organized into search teams. They scattered across the park and began calling the young boy’s name, pulling bushes apart, searching the branches of trees, trampling the ground with their feet. Within minutes, before Calvano or Maggie could stop them, any evidence had likely been destroyed by well-meaning strangers. They would have nothing to go on at all.

Which meant it was all up to me. If I hurried, I might be able to pick up a trace of where he had gone.

Maggie had reached the edge of the playground, angry at being called away from her crime scene. But when told of the boy’s disappearance, she looked every bit as disbelieving as Calvano had. She began arguing with Calvano in a tight circle formed by patrolmen to keep civilians out. It looked oddly like a football huddle, and it did little to conceal the heated argument they were having. Calvano had about three theories, all of them confusing. Maggie had one: the two crimes were not related. Both she and Peggy Calhoun had estimated the nurse’s time of death at least twenty-four hours before, and there was no reason to suspect the boy being taken was anything but a crime of opportunity.

Calvano was of the opinion that they should take the missing boy’s mother over to view the nurse’s body just in case it turned out that she knew the woman—proving there might be a connection between the two cases. The silence that met this suggestion did not faze him. “It’s fast and efficient,” he insisted.

“Let me get this straight,” Maggie asked, trying to keep her voice neutral. “This poor woman loses her husband to war, and now her only connection to him, their son, is missing, and you want to ask her to go look at the dead body of a woman with a bullet through her head?” Maggie’s voice broke with frustration. “I’ve called in Gonzales. Let’s let him make the call about how to approach this.”

“There’s not going to be anything left in the park to go on,” one of the beat cops said. “People are trampling any evidence there might have been.”

“All we can do right now is try to talk to the mother and pray that someone she knows did this,” Maggie said. “If it’s a stranger abduction, we’re done.”

“It was that weirdo,” Calvano told the others. “This fat guy with flour in his hair. I questioned him earlier. I got a weird vibe off him. And he lives around here. He’d know how to get out of the park fast.”

Some of the gathered officers looked hopeful at this, but Maggie knew Calvano too well to believe his hunches were worth a damn. “We’ll let Gonzales make the call,” she repeated. “In the meantime, I need the door of the cottage under guard at all times, no one gets in or out, and, for God’s sake, keep the search for the missing boy from spilling over into my crime scene. No one goes near that yard. The rest of you need to search the surrounding neighborhood.” When Maggie gave orders, she had a way of sounding as if she were asking for your help personally, and that you and you alone could help her out. The uniforms began their organized search for the boy without hesitation.

Maggie sat by the sobbing mother, waiting patiently while the woman fought for control. She was hoping to get something from her before Gonzales arrived. I didn’t think it would happen, and I could feel that Maggie didn’t either. Still, she had to try.

Meanwhile, Calvano went running after some civilian searchers so he could blow off his frustration by screaming at them

And me? I went in search of the abductor.

I could find no trace of the boy. Too many lives filled the park and too many emotions muddied the air. The taking of a child is a transgression that strikes a chord of visceral terror in everyone, whether they have children or not. It is a primal reaction beyond our control: no one likes to be reminded of how helpless we are to stop the worst from happening. Because of this, everywhere I turned, the way was blocked, either by well-meaning searchers or by the residual energy from their frenzied emotions.

A child that small, barely four years of age, would be so trusting. I could almost see him lifting his innocent face to the stranger’s, listening intently to his story, wanting to be a good boy, and, believing the story to be true, slipping his tiny hand into the man’s larger hand before marching away with him like the big boy he believed himself to be. The child would be unformed, his emotions fleeting and hard to trace—which meant I needed to concentrate on the abductor. He would leave an emotional trail like a snake slithering though grass. I had tracked evil before.

Where had the boy been taken to hide? With this many people searching and no trace of him to be found, I was pretty sure the child was no longer in the park. I would concentrate on the exits and picking up the predatory scent of his abductor. I circled the edges of the park, seeking an indication of darkness that might lead me to the boy.

Along the back edge of the park, I discovered what had to be lingering traces of the kidnapper. It was near the side street where my dear old lady, Noni Bates, and her lonely middle-aged neighbor, Robert Michael Martin, had discovered the rabbit’s nest. A vein of darkness lingered in the air, surrounded by more troubled emotions. Ambivalence, perhaps, and a hint of shame. Self-loathing.
Lots of self-loathing.
And something that felt very much like sadness.

This was either a conflicted kidnapper or someone who had never done this before.

Had he taken the boy out of opportunity? If Robert Michael Martin was telling the truth, he had seen the abductor watching the children all week. Had he been fighting his urges the entire time and then been unable to resist the perfect opportunity that unfolded before him, taking the child on a whim?

Or
, an unwilling thought intruded,
perhaps Robert Michael Martin was the abductor after all.
He had left the nurse’s cottage and surely followed this route on his way back home. He had been angry and felt overlooked. He had been in need of power. And he certainly seemed obsessed with children. Perhaps the temptation had been too much.

I wished for my new friend Noni that it was not so, but I hoped it
was
him, so that the boy might be found.

I see what others miss, as mortals often overlook the nuances of their world. Or perhaps the searchers were simply moving too fast. But there, green among the green, just along the outer edge of the park’s back lawn, I discovered a plastic dinosaur, about three inches long, lying on its side in a patch of grass that concealed it from human eyes. It was a deeper green than the lawn, but it was the feeling of it that drew me to it. My intuition is akin to a sense of smell in that it affirms the existence of the invisible. But it is different in every other way. It’s just that smell comes closest to what I experience. It fills me until there is no doubt as to what I know. When I knelt next to the plastic toy, I felt the joy of a cozy kitchen on a weekend morning. The smell of pancakes and a mother’s lingering perfume permeated my mind. I tasted grape juice and heard the din of cartoon characters crashing into one another, felt the soft scratch of a favorite stuffed toy on my cheek and, to my deep joy, experienced the humanness of hunger.

Yes, the toy belonged to the boy. He had been taken out this way.

The volunteer searchers had left this end of the park. But a crime scene crew would probably come through in hopes of finding anything that might yield a clue. I owed it to them to make sure they found the toy.

I had broken the boundary between my old and new worlds once before, and the pain had debilitated me for days. I could not afford to tear the fabric between the two worlds now; I needed to keep searching for the boy. I would have to find a way to reveal the toy without attempting to move it.

In the end, the best I could do was to summon a light breeze to rustle the grass around the toy. With concentration, I was able to flatten the blades slightly around it. But it would still take good eyes to spot it.

That job done, I searched the sidewalk leading away from the park, losing the trail at a parking space halfway down the block. The abductor had driven away in a car.

I headed back to the crime scenes, knowing Gonzales would have arrived by now and wondering who would win the battle of strategy—Maggie or Calvano. The three of them were sitting in a town car parked near the nurse’s cottage, the driver dismissed in the interest of discretion. He was standing outside the car, smoking a cigarette and bullshitting the female cop who had been guarding the crime scene earlier.

The town car belonged to Gonzales. It was a luxury sedan designed for bigwigs and politicians. Gonzales was both. He had risen rapidly though the ranks of the department and had been named commander a few years before. He was impossible to pin down and therefore impossible to contradict. Like all politicians, he had no core of his own. He was as close to being a shape-shifter as humans ever get, morphing his opinions and attitudes to mirror those he was with at the time, eluding all attempts at revealing who he really was. It served him well. He’d gone far being all things to all people while, essentially, being no one at all.

This was unfortunate for Calvano. I have done a lot of watching since I died, my voyeurism extending behind closed doors. Gonzales had a soft spot for Maggie. He looked upon her as a daughter or, perhaps, a protégée. He knew her father, and I had eavesdropped on many a conversation between them. Maggie’s father was the old guard, and it would be a few more years before Gonzales could ignore their wishes. Calvano was deluded if he thought that Gonzales would take his advice over Maggie’s.

It didn’t take Calvano long to find this out. “Absolutely not,” Gonzales was saying to him. “Leave the mother alone. If you want to look for a connection, question her friends or other mothers in the park. Ask if any of them know Fiona.” When Calvano looked blank, Gonzales shook his head. “That’s the murder victim, Calvano. Her name is Fiona Harker. Just ask if anyone knows her and leave it at that for now. We’ll find the connection, if there is one.”

Calvano looked as if he had been just passed over for captain of the football team. Pouting is not an attractive trait in a grown man.

“Have you got anything else?” Gonzales asked him.

“Yes,” Calvano said, refusing to meet Maggie’s eyes. “There was one guy I talked to, a neighbor. There’s something wrong with him. I can feel it. He tried to interject himself into the investigation. The boy was taken right after he left the first crime scene. It could be he came sniffing back around after killing the nurse to see what we knew, and when I blew him off and didn’t play his game, maybe he got angry and took the boy?”

“Because nurse-murdering pedophiles are our number one problem in this state,” Maggie offered, although sarcasm was not one of her preferred weapons. Calvano was starting to get to her. Partnering with him would be like babysitting a chimpanzee.